


All the Cold in the World

by aeli_kindara



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Recovering, Canon Compliant, Gen, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Sled Dog Racing, Steve/Bucky if you squint or just generally have eyes, no YOU wrote a dog sledding spy thriller, so very many good dogs, wind chills you don't even want to contemplate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-23 22:23:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15616302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: In which Bucky Barnes enters a sled dog race to escape the long arm of the law.





	All the Cold in the World

**Author's Note:**

> _You can feel the Yukon is close — a behemoth, yawning expanse of ice. It brings all the cold in the world down to it._
> 
> \- Kristin Knight Pace, [Between Pelly and Dawson](http://www.yukonquest.com/news/between-pelly-and-dawson)
> 
> I would like to say this is Nat and Leo's fault, but I'm not at all sure it isn't just 100% mine.

### I.

Steve didn’t grow up with telephones. Bad news never came with that particular foreboding — a tinny ring in an empty room. It came from doctors, hats in hands, the corners of their mouths twitching with anxious sympathy, or else stone-faced and somber. It came with colors, like black, and sounds, like children shouting, like the world going on without you; it came with neighbors bringing casseroles, with keeping one stowed in the bathtub that doubled as the kitchen table because there wasn’t any room in the icebox.

Bad news didn’t come from telephones, but he still knows. He’s standing at his bathroom mirror — he has his own bathroom, it has its own mirror — adjusting his tie for the latest round of depositions, trying to see himself in the crisp black suit jacket, the navy half-windsor, the neatly combed hair — when he hears his phone buzzing across the tabletop in the kitchen, and he knows.

He thinks, for a fleeting moment, that he could leave it. That these ill tidings could speed their way through the air waves, across miles, out into the ether and back down to his little apartment, only to die there, airless in an empty room. That if he doesn’t answer, it won’t be true.

He smooths his tie. His shoes tap crisply on the hardwood floor.

“They found him,” says Natasha’s voice. “They’re moving in.”

 

### II.

The mistake he makes, in the end, is the goddamn library card.

He ditches his IDs at a paper mill in North Carolina, his guns at a smelter in Illinois. He keeps one pistol, six rounds. He doesn’t use them.

He floats across the country like a ghost. He hitchhikes, he walks, he hops trains. He sleeps two weeks in the public park of a tiny railroad town in Montana. No one bothers him there, and the picnic table under the shelter is almost as good as a bed. He walks each day across the tracks to the little public library, spends hours among the battered hardbacks of the history section, until his metal fingertips know them by the touch of their spines.

He reads everything he can find about Cap and his Howling Commandos, Agent Peggy Carter, Bucky Barnes. There are things in his mind that don’t match the stories on the page. He reads about the Soviet Union, about the Cold War. He reads about tiny political upheavals, mere historical footnotes, in Malawi, in Nicaragua, in Ukraine. He remembers the croak of frogs in a rainforest, gunmetal slick with condensation. Remembers crouching in a hayfield, grass seeds clinging to his skin.

The itch of stability catches up with him. He moves on.

He finds work in box store parking lots and takes his pay in cash. Speaking Spanish helps. He keeps moving westward, then south, then north again — never too long in one town. Never enough time to let anyone memorize his face.

He takes work on a fishing boat in Seattle and jumps ship in Anchorage, Alaska. The summer is turning to fall here already, yellow on the aspens and red on the blueberry bushes that line the sides of the roads. He walks north, into the mountains, away from the sea. A man in an enormous pickup with plywood dog kennels built onto its flatbed stops and offers him a ride.

“You’re tough,” he says, “out here in this weather.”

It’s snowing. Bucky shrugs. The man has a dog in his passenger seat. He scoots it over into the middle to let Bucky climb inside. The dog is black and white with tan eyebrows, grizzled gray fringe on its jaw. It leans into Bucky’s hand when Bucky scratches its ears. It groans, its own leg twitching as if to scratch the phantom itch, then hammering against the seat.

Its fur is thick. Working his fingers through it brings a slow ache to Bucky’s wrist. He switches to his metal hand.

“His name is Anchor,” says the driver. “He likes you.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything.

“What’s your name?” says the driver.

“Jim,” says Bucky, because aliases come to him like snowflakes, these days. “Jim Grant.”

The driver has dark hair and a straight nose and a mouth that likes to smile. “I’m Kaito,” he says, and Bucky nods his understanding.

They pull off the road at a Denny’s in Fairbanks. “Hey,” says Kaito, “my help for the season just had to quit on me — broke her leg on a mountain last week. I don’t know if you’re looking for work, but here’s my number — give me a call if you think you’d like to try running dogs.”

He holds out a piece of paper. Bucky doesn’t take it. He says, “Yes.”

\---

Kaito lives twenty miles east of Fairbanks, on a rough-cut family homestead, with his wife Julia and his father Andrew and his mother Marie and his grandfather Haru Takahashi, and fifty-seven dogs.

Haru Takahashi is delighted to learn that Bucky speaks a little Japanese. The fifty-seven dogs are delighted to learn his metal hand never gets tired of delivering ear scratches.

There’s no internet. Electricity from a generator, water from a well. The driveway is two miles long and nearly impassable, even with four-wheel drive. The nearest neighbors are seven miles away. Everything else is spruce forest.

Bucky thinks he might be able to stay here for a while.

They give him a little cabin next to the dog yard with a narrow bed and a woodstove. They pay him four hundred dollars every month, and talk to him a lot about that until he finally figures out they’re worried it isn’t enough. He feeds the dogs and cleans the yard and organizes the equipment, and after a little while Kaito and Julia start letting him run teams.

They tell him he’s good at this. He knows which dogs will do well in lead, and which could use a place back in the team. He knows when to push and when to let them run easy and when to hold them back. His hands are careful and sensitive on their paws, checking each one for injury, massaging their muscles, tracking the arcs of their fine bones.

He works with the racing dogs, mostly — about two thirds of the yard. He finds that he likes the way they throw themselves into their job. They like running — love it, even. But it’s not because anyone is making them. You can’t — Bucky learns quickly — _make_ a dog do anything. They run because they want to run, and are gracious enough to let a musher install some semblance of organization around the whole endeavor.

Dogs have personalities. Clementine is a possessive cuddlebug to Bucky and a coolly disinterested mother to her four-month-old puppies now working at demolishing everything in their pen at the corner of the yard. Pearl — short for Pearl Jam, a half-sibling of Clementine’s — thinks he’s hot shit after leading last year’s Iditarod team home at the tender age of two. He’s also madly in love with Queenie, a nine-year-old superstar newly retired from the main racing team to help Haru Takahashi run his trapline. Queenie's as likely to chew on Pearl’s ear as to look at him.

All of them squabble constantly in the dog yard and run together like a dream. They’re a family. They remind Bucky of certain memories from his own life, ones he isn’t yet sure he can own.

The Takahashis seem to understand he likes his space and quiet, and they don’t ask him too much about himself. It’s several weeks before he accidentally shows them his metal hand. He’s bracing himself, then, to move on, but instead Haru Takahashi says, in careful, accented English, “You were a soldier.”

Bucky nods. Haru pulls up his pant leg — the right one — to show his shin. There’s an ugly red-purple scar all around it, in a spiral; his calf is thinner than it should be, atrophied by the wound. He says, “Me too.”

Haru Takahashi is Japanese. He fought against America in the war. Bucky was there; he understands. He knows what it’s like to kill for the wrong side.

It’s an act of trust. Haru Takahashi trusts him. Bucky nods his thanks.

The winter wears on, deep and cold and dark. Daylight dwindles to a sliver. The aurora dances in the sky outside more evenings than not. The dogs like to howl at it, on starry nights; Bucky learns that he can get them started if he howls first.

The Takahashis give him homemade beaver mitts for Christmas. They’re impossibly warm and even more impossibly useful, especially when the racing season begins. His job is to travel with the team, to drive the truck, to pack food and supplies, to fix the sleds, to meet them at checkpoints and care for the dogs with sprained wrists or stomach bugs.

They let him take the truck into Fairbanks on his days off, and he starts going to the library again. He picks up where he left off. He gets a library card, so he can take books home. He finds some new biographies of Captain America. One of them covers his life since he came out of the ice, three years ago. He finds a book about Malawi.

There are memories in his brain that feel like tiny outcrops of some much larger massif of knowledge — so many of them. He rakes at them, trying to learn more. He reads all the books he can get his hands on. He hammers at what he doesn’t understand.

_Daybreak_ is a biological station in coastal Nova Scotia, and the bunker beneath it, hidden by high tide. _Homecoming_ is Siberia. _Nine_ is a bank vault in Washington, DC.

There are others. A map in his brain, half-glimpsed. They’re stations. They have tanks, they have chairs. They have supplies. They are secret. They make the music in his brain shrill with anxious dread.

The library doesn’t have much to offer him, but it has some. The _Daybreak_ station’s surroundings are mapped in a 1986 graduate thesis on the reproductive ecology of black guillemots that he finds on interlibrary loan. _Nine_ is on fire insurance maps from the 1950s. _Rusted_ is an abandoned cannery building in Chicago, described in a history of the industry he locates on the library’s shelves.

He finds a copy of a geological report on far eastern Siberia. He finds a travelogue by a motorcyclist traversing the length of Russia. He finds a chronicle of sightings of the unexplained that covers a ghostly cargo ship sailing without any flag off the Namibian coast twenty years ago — _Freight Car._ He finds another that mentions a satellite no governments will claim ownership of — _One._

_Longing_ is in London, _Seventeen_ in Beijing. _Furnace_ eludes him for months, but he finds it at last in Germany, not far from where he once fell from that train.

He finds _Benign_ in the writings of latter-day Yukon gold prospectors, and that’s where they find him.

It wasn’t the Cap books — millions of people get every Cap book they can find out of their local library. It wasn’t the name — he randomized that, Steve Bonavista, because the universe is fucking hilarious sometimes. It was the pattern. Dots on a map. London, Siberia, Bavaria, Chicago, Nova Scotia. Beijing. The Yukon. Washington, DC.

It happens when he’s sitting there, the constellation tattooed across his mind. It happens when he’s suddenly aware — _how is he aware_ — of locations, coordinates, a ship waiting out in the Maldives and a shuttle completing its near-hourly revolution around the planet. Ten words. Ten chairs. Ten points of light in his mind, and he’s sitting at his habitual desk in the library but his ears are a thousand miles away, his senses are full of something else, of — _electricity_ — snapping out through his muscle, his body, his bone —

There’s a crash. The shelf behind him overturns. The Winter Soldier swivels, and blinks at the scene around him.

A black man in a huge metal suit is battling a guy in a blue close-fitting uniform with a circular shield on his arm. There’s a star on his shield, and a helmet on his head, and he’s yelling “You’re gonna _leave him be,_ Rhodey, he’s my _friend_ —”

The Winter Soldier doesn’t care what their dispute is over, except that he isn’t sure which of them is his handler. He issued the recalibration sequence himself. He says, in Russian, “ _Ready to comply._ ”

“Cap,” the black guy is yelling, “I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re doing here, but I’ve been ordered by the President himself to bring this guy in —”

“You’re not going to bring him in! You’ll wind up dead, and him along with you, and if you’ll _just let me talk to him_ —”

The guy in blue’s helmet has come undone, knocked sideways by a metal punch. He has blonde hair that sticks up everywhere. Under his tactical jacket, he’s wearing a shirt and tie. Something about him twinges in the Winter Soldier’s chest.

He says, again, “ _Ready to comply._ ”

The blonde guy is on his back. He twists. His face is desperate. “Buck,” he’s saying, “Bucky —”

Who the hell is Bucky? One of these guys is supposed to be his handler. Or one of the dozen others, camo-clad and ready with their rifles, waiting for a clear shot. At him?

Fuck it. He gave the command sequence; barring another handler identifying himself, that means the ranking officer is him. And he is sick of this bullshit.

The Winter Soldier dodges low. He rips the flare from the nearest soldier’s belt before he has time to react. He shuts his eyes when it goes off, rolls, comes up fast. He grabs the nearest guy’s rifle and swings the butt into the side of his head. He raises his metal arm to deflect a bullet. This is easy; this, he knows.

The men are yelling, converging. The Soldier fights.

 

### III.

“What in the _hell,_ ” says Rhodey, “was that the fuck about?”

Steve is holding an ice pack to his jaw. Rhodey is briefly proud of himself for fucking up Captain America enough to make him put an ice pack on his jaw. But he has more important things to deal with.

This entire op is already a mess. A tip on the Winter Soldier that no one will explain to him; a joint Air Force/Army strike team, because this used to be something SHIELD would handle, and no one's quite worked out the chain of command without them. Being the lone superhero who actually cares about things like chain of command doesn't help. Especially when Captain America goes and throws himself on your sword.

They’re alone in a shitty motel room. Steve looks up at him warily, eyes shining, bruised with hope and loss.

He says, “Rhodey, he’s my friend.”

Rhodey exhales sharply through his nose. “You said that. I also remember him leaving you hospitalized after the Triskelion, which doesn’t seem real friendly to me.”

“It’s not his fault.” The words are automatic, dismissive. “They brainwashed him.”

“And that just now? He took down my entire team. Was that brainwashing?”

Steve looks away. “He didn’t kill any of them.”

“That’s not an answer to my question.”

Steve sighs deeply — it goes on for a while, supersoldier lungs hold a lot of air — and stretches back on the bed. “I don’t know, okay? I don’t think he’d have left me alive if he was still following HYDRA orders. I don’t think he’d have run to Alaska if he was still following HYDRA orders. He’s — listen, Rhodey, whatever they did to him, they did it for _seventy years._ Can you even imagine? But he’s still Bucky, under all that. I’m sure of it.”

Wait. That’s not —

“Hang on,” says Rhodey. “Hang on one second. You’re saying that’s — Bucky _Barnes?”_

And yep, that’s Captain fucking America looking up at him through liquid, long-lashed eyes like a fucking war bride praying for her husband’s safe return.

He says, “I thought you knew.”

“You thought I — hang on _just one second.”_ Rhodey drops to the bed beside Cap. “You thought I — you thought I _knew_ they’d sent me after _Sergeant Bucky Barnes?”_

Steve closes his eyes again. “You read the comics. Right.”

“Comics my ass!” exclaims Rhodey, sounding for an instant exactly like his mother, and it’s a good thing Steve is too oblivious right now to mock him for that one for the rest of his life. “I learned about him in ROTC. He was a tactical genius. He invented strategies that are the backbone of how we deploy Special Ops today. I studied him all over again when I was trying to figure out how to deal with Tony deciding to dress up as a fucking superhero — the Howling Commandos were the first super-integrated unit in the history of warfare, and he was behind so much of their —”

He abruptly remembers who he’s talking to, and his words disintegrate into a fit of coughing. “But, uh,” he manages when he’s done. “But you know that, I guess.”

“A lot of it was Peggy, too,” says Steve. “Together they were pretty unstoppable.”

Rhodey snorts. “Yeah, and you had nothing to do with that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Steve. “What matters is —”

“— he’s alive, and you’d like him to stay that way,” Rhodey finishes. “Yeah. What are we gonna do about it?”

 

### IV.

Bucky returns to himself on the floor of the tiny cabin, knuckles bloody, shivering from cold.

It takes him long minutes to make sense of where he is. First, gravity — the wood at his back is horizontal, not vertical, that's logical when he thinks about it — then the lopsided view of the shelves stocked with cans of beans, the frosted windowpane, the spruces outside.

He’s not dressed for this cold. His body is shivering, superserum or no superserum. It’s too close to temperatures he doesn’t want to remember. It’s too close to —

What _happened?_

He closes his eyes and forces himself to think. He was in the library. He was in the library, and — something _happened_ to him, what —

It’s too cold to think. There are straw bales in the corner. That’s right, Bucky thinks: this is Haru's trapping cabin. He keeps a few supplies here, just in case. But this is miles from the city, and just as many miles from home. How did he —

He wrenches himself upright with difficulty. His head swims. He lurches to the door and opens it. It’s snowing outside. Under the new blanket of it, he can just barely make out the divots of his tracks: one foot after another. He walked.

He feels an abrupt need to sit down. He ignores it. His feet ache. But this is Takahashi’s cabin, and that means —

He finds it behind the straw: fuel and a simple cooker, encrusted with the remnants of dog food, but it’ll do. He sets it up outside the door and manages to get it lit. He finds a manual can opener and raids five cans of beans from the shelves, dumps them all in. He can’t find any utensils. He uses a bit of broken plank he finds in a corner to spoon the food into his mouth. He scrapes the pot when he’s done.

Warm food in his belly helps some, but it must be late; it’s cold, and getting colder. It bites through his lightweight down jacket. Alaskans never fully delayer, in winter, but still, he wishes for his parka. He wishes for Clementine to curl up on his chest, drape her tail over his neck like a ruff.

He doesn’t have dogs, but he has straw. He pulls the twine holding the bale together loose with his metal hand. He fluffs it around himself like he would to bed down the dogs. He burrows into it.

The familiar scent is a helpful reminder. He’s not in a tank, or a Siberian HYDRA base, or the Alps, or the frozen mud of a trench on a winter’s day. He’s in fucking Alaska, which is worse than all those things in some ways, but far better in others.

What _happened?_ He was — remembering. That’s what brought them down on him. And that’s what brought him down on them, too. He shivers, and it’s not only from cold.

Is that a helicopter’s drone in the distance? Are they looking? He should run, maybe. Find somewhere safer. But where can he go? Not back to the Takahashis — he’d put them in danger. But into the wilderness, with so little by way of supplies — with his _booby-trapped mind_ —

He can’t think of the map, of the names. His mind is like of those punchcards the scientists used to use to store his data, back in the 50s. A pattern of dots, a readout, an override. _Comply._

Once he starts laughing, he can’t stop. He digs his spine against the logs of the cabin wall. He curls in on his belly, gasping for air. He laughs and laughs and laughs. He feels like one of the dogs, trying to vomit up something nasty it ate, but he heaves and heaves and the map in his brain doesn’t budge.

He’ll have to not think about it. He can get by not thinking about it, so long as no one says the words outright. Can he? He’ll have to. But first, he has to fucking _survive._

A knock sounds on the door.

Bucky freezes.

There’s a jingling outside, and a happy bark. The knob turns, and a headlight flares in Bucky’s eyes. Then it turns off, and by the moonlight, he can just barely make out the shape of a man in the gloom.

“Jim-kun?” says Haru Takahashi. He’s holding something in his arms. It’s bulky: a parka. “The truck was empty. I brought your things. The soldiers are looking for you, I think. But don't worry. We have a plan.”

 

### V.

From the air, Alaska looks half-finished.

Natasha considers the landscape rolling out before her from the controls of the quinjet. The high mountains are behind her now — soaring and immaculate, blinding white in the light of the sun — and beyond them sprawls the vast expanse of the Interior. It looks like an enormous sandbox abandoned by some mercurial deity who became bored with the work of creation. The hills are lumpy and rolling, the valleys vast braided gravel plains. Narrow spruces bristle from the land like the hair on the hackles of a dog.

Fairbanks, coming into view below her, is a grid of vacant streets and dirty snowbanks. Roads end abruptly where they met frozen sloughs. Yards of heavy equipment outnumber residential blocks. The curving outlines of a housing development look out of place, nested within the gridded city streets. Natasha bypasses the commercial airport and the army airfield alike in favor of landing on the frozen pond next to Steve’s hotel.

They’re all in the conference room off the lobby. Natasha spares a look, through the glass doors; Glenn Talbot is blustering about something, gesticulating. Steve looks tired, Rhodey unreadable. Natasha fills a coffee cup from the remains of the continental breakfast. She gives a lazy wave to the woman at the desk, who after a moment raises her hand in confused response, and breezes inside.

“— and _this,_ ” General Talbot is saying. “I understand you people are used to operating without jurisdiction, but you’re not doing it under _my_ command, and you’re going to land your damn jets at the damn base like everyone else!”

“Hey, fellas,” says Natasha, cocking her head toward Talbot as she slides into her seat. “I think you’ll find my flight plans are in order, Brigadier General. And we usually prefer ‘Avengers’ to ‘you people.’”

Talbot visibly swallows a scowl. “Agent Romanoff,” he says stiffly.

“Not an agent anymore, technically. Private security contractor. Here to audit your response to the purported reappearance of the so-called ‘Winter Soldier.’ In —” she pauses for delicate effect — “Fairbanks, Alaska.”

“I don’t have time for this bullshit,” snaps Talbot. “If he gets away while you’ve got us snarled up in bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo —”

“Ah,” Natasha interrupts, “bureaucracy. That’s an excellent place to start. Now — I understand that you and your men are acting on a hit from a SHIELD legacy algorithm designed under the supervision of Jasper Sitwell, a known HYDRA operative. I further understand that you do not, in fact, understand yourselves what _about_ this man caused the algorithm to flag him, or indeed, have any proof that he is in fact the Winter Soldier.”

Talbot seems to swell with indignation. “He fought his way past War Machine and twelve of my best men! If that’s not evidence enough —”

“From the reports I have here,” says Natasha, “it seems that there was a great deal of confusion, and the unexpected deployment of one of your soldier’s flares. In addition —” she makes a show of rifling through her briefcase — “it appears that your team was hampered in their efforts by the actions of Captain America, acting — as he so often has — in defense of citizens’ rights to truth, justice, and freedom. Tell me, Brigadier General. Do you have a warrant for Mr. Bonavista’s arrest?”

“We don’t need a _warrant,”_ interrupts the other jarhead type, seated at Talbot’s left, “for taking in an internationally wanted terrorist!”

Natasha stretches in her seat. She spreads her briefcase open on the table and flicks through its contents, taking her time. She could get used to this.

There’s the file she wants. God, she loves Maria Hill. She pulls it out and makes a show of examining it.

“I don’t see anything about an internationally wanted terrorist here,” she says at length, flipping the paper over to show the algorithm’s readout. “I see that something called an — ah — ‘Asset Recovery Protocol’ flagged a Mr. Steve Bonavista of P.O. Box 673, Fairbanks, Alaska, for — let’s see here. Oh, there it is. ‘Unusual library card activity.’”

She lets the scorn drip from her every syllable. Talbot has the decency to flush red.

Natasha glances at the wall clock. If she can’t buy Barnes a few days on the back of this bullshit, she isn’t very good at her job at all.

“Colonel Rhodes,” she says, turning to him. “How were you first contacted for this mission?”

Rhodey stretches, leaning back in his chair. Another second ticks by on the clock. He pauses, weighing his response.

As well he should. This whole thing was his idea.

And oh, it’s going to be fun.

 

### VI.

The Takahashis’ idea is batshit insane.

“This idea is batshit insane,” Bucky tells them.

But Kaito is grinning. Julia, at his side, is watery-eyed but smiling; Andrew and Marie are holding hands. Marie reaches out with her free hand to grasp his — the metal one, clad in its usual glove. Lightly, reflexively, he grips back.

“It’s risky, yes,” she says, “and we haven’t worked out all of the details, but it’s a way to get you out of the country. We have friends in Whitehorse that can help you. And Kaito doesn’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” Kaito echoes. “I want you to do it, Jim.”

“My name’s not Jim,” says Bucky, even though it sort of is.

“Sure it is. To us.”

Bucky feels a lump in his throat. God damn it. God damn them, and their batshit fucking idea.

Julia’s crying outright now. She reaches for his other hand, the one Marie’s not holding. “Try and win for us, hey?”

Because this is their batshit fucking idea:

Bucky is going to run the Yukon Quest in Kaito’s place.

\---

The start is two days away, in Fairbanks. The finish is in Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territories, nine hundred and eighty-six miles down the trail.

Bucky knows that. He knows that because he’s been over every mile of the race plan with Kaito, over the last few weeks. He knows it because he’s been planning the checkpoints and the supplies and the food rations obsessively. He knows it because they’ve workshopped every possible run/rest schedule; because he’s been running the race team, watching for small hitches in their gait, monitoring their eating, keeping an eye out for _any tiny thing_ that could possibly go wrong or right.

“You’re as prepared for this as I am,” says Kaito, and he’s not wrong.

But he’s still insane. He’s been working all year for this — all his _life,_ practically. The dogs are looking better this year than ever before. Julia’s entered to run them in the Iditarod, a month from now, but the Yukon Quest is Kaito’s big race. The end of his season. Letting Bucky take his place —

“They will watch the roads,” says Haru, sensibly, as if he isn’t ringleading his entire family into smuggling a fugitive out of the country. “They will watch the airports. No one will watch the dogs.”

“It’s forecast as a cold start,” adds Kaito, eager. “Your face will be covered. No one will be looking for you there anyway. You can hide in plain sight.”

It’s still insane. But a thought is pinging somewhere in Bucky’s mind. A thought he has to tread carefully around, lest it unearth its chain of secrets, but: there’s a base, buried deep in the Klondike. A base with food, supplies, weapons. Transportation. Equipment built for him. A base he’s pretty sure has been empty since long before SHIELD and HYDRA fell.

“There’s somewhere I could go,” he says, slowly, “to disappear. A safe place.”

The family trade looks. It’s Andrew that speaks, at last — Andrew, who normally seems the most staid and sensible of them all, Andrew who has a regular job in construction and still cooks dinner more nights of the week than not and rarely speaks to Bucky at all.

Bucky has never been sure if he approves of his presence. If anyone in this family were to turn him in, Andrew would be the one.

Andrew says, “Then let’s get you there.”

\---

The morning of the start dawns clear and cold, the thermometer pushing negative twenty and frost beards growing on the dogs’ whiskers.

There’s ice fog on the river, mingling with the woodsmoke from spectators’ fires. Some are toasting marshmallows. Police officers pace the start line, offering Bucky genial smiles. One bends over to scratch between Lyra's ears.

If Bucky’s face were at all exposed, he’d be growing a frost beard of his own. As it is, the fur ruff of his parka’s hood is heavy with ice crystals, and the fleece pulled over his nose and mouth is stiff. He doesn’t pull it down for interviews, and offers brief, emotionless answers, but the reporters seem to want to talk to him anyway.

“And a big story in this year’s Quest,” one is saying, ushering over her cameraman, “is that Kaito Takahashi — one of the favorites for the race after his wife’s strong showing with this team in the Copper Basin 300 — has _pulled out_ with an injury. Taking his place is his handler Jim Grant, and we’re here with him now. I understand this is your first race, Jim!”

Bucky says, “Yes.”

“Quite a task to undertake! A _thousand miles._ The Yukon Quest is often described as the hardest race in the sport — harder even than next month’s Iditarod. How are you feeling about it? Confident? Intimidated?”

Bucky considers how to answer that. He leans toward the microphone and says, “A little.”

“A little of both!” The reporter lets out a tinkling laugh. “Well, as I’m sure you know, the Takahashi family has quite a history in Alaskan dog mushing, and we know they wouldn’t have passed the torch to you without utmost confidence in your abilities. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today!”

As Bucky edges away, he hears her saying, “A man of few words, Jim Grant. Well, Scott, back to you for an overview of the weather these mushers will be facing over the next week and a half — looks like it could be a cold one…”

Bucky tunes her out. It’s time to give his team one last once-over. Pearl and Aspen are in lead, banging their harnesses in excitement. Clementine and Hester are in swing. He ruffles their ears and moves down the line, murmuring to each dog as he goes. Lyra, Ruby, Jopari, Anastasia, Dave; Kurt, Topaz, Ash, Mamushi, Pants. They're ridiculous names, for ridiculous dogs: joyful, impossible, wayward, ridiculous animals, spinning and barking and goofing around with each other, ready to snap into focus at a moment's notice. Fourteen beating hearts, trusting him to guide them through the wilderness. Letting him trust _them_.

There’s something comforting in it. Whether he succeeds or fails, he has a job: take care of the dogs. Get them back to the Takahashis safe. Everything else is noise.

“We’ll see you at the first checkpoint,” Haru tells him in an undertone. Kaito is at the head of the line, stringing the team out in formation. Julia is giving Mamushi a final parting kiss. The race official is counting down. Bucky returns to his sled, stands on the brake, reaches to pull his snow hook.

Through the crowd, he thinks he glimpses two familiar heads, a blonde and a red. A mustached man in uniform is standing next to them, looking annoyed. Bucky’s gut twinges with recognition and fear.

The team are leaping in their harnesses, eager to run. “Two,” the woman says. “One.”

She steps clear, and her arm flies high, waving them on. Bucky releases the brake. His team springs forward.

And they’re running, surging through the cheering crowds and blurred faces and down onto the river ice, with the past behind them and the biggest country anywhere at their feet.

 

### VII.

Maria is having a shitty fucking morning.

Tony Stark, billionaire genius, arguably the sharpest mind of his generation, architect of modern warfare, privatizer of world peace, has broken the coffeemaker.

He has, in fact, broken _all_ the coffeemakers. He has apparently decided that Avengers Tower needs a centralized coffee-making technology. It is, reportedly, a "travesty" that each _individual_ espresso machine needs to be taught one’s preferences rather than _all_ espresso machines in the building recognizing their customer and providing accordingly. Currently, no espresso machines are providing anything but random blasts of steam, and the hipster place across the street has given her something that smells more like patchouli than coffee, and Maria would frankly prefer hurling it in the face of the next person who attempts to speak to her over drinking the damn thing.

Unfortunately, that’s not an option, because the people speaking to her — several of them at once, only one of whom has the excuse of being Captain America — are in fucking Alaska. Where there’s probably better coffee than Manhattan anyway.

“I understand that you’re pleased to have delayed Talbot,” she says through gritted teeth, “but the whole point of delaying Talbot was to _find him ourselves._ ”

“The whole point was to get him somewhere safe,” Steve counters. _Damn your white teeth and American values,_ Maria thinks crabbily, though neither is much in evidence at the moment. “The whole point was to keep him out of the government’s hands, and we have. Yes, I’d rather know he’s okay, but if we can’t find him then Talbot probably can’t either, and that’s —”

“— still a _supersoldier assassin on the loose,_ ” Maria gripes, and sucks down another gulp of her godawful coffee.

It shouldn’t be this hard to find the guy. She has every advantage she could: Stark Industries tech at her disposal, the best facial recognition program money can buy, access to traffic cams, news archives, military satellites. Most of all, she knows who she’s looking for, which Talbot doesn’t. All he’s got is some grainy, masked footage of the Winter Soldier. Maria has an algorithm trained on the Smithsonian’s entire archive on Bucky Barnes.

“Maria,” says Natasha, coaxing, “I agree with Steve. If Barnes doesn’t want to be found and he’s _not_ being found — it’s not like he’s had any known kills in the last year, including when the team tried to take him in. I don’t see the harm in —”

“I agree with both of them,” says Colonel Rhodes. “Not that I’m here or have any knowledge of this conversation. If anyone asks.”

Maria sighs, deflating. Rhodey’s supposed to be the reasonable one. Her ally. “Yeah, well,” she mutters, “you’re in love with the damn guy.”

It startles her that it’s Rogers who answers. “Yeah,” he says steadily, “and I’d like to find him more than anything, but if we can’t — we’ve set Talbot back days. We’ve given him a fighting chance. And I’d rather never see him again then let him be used as a tool — by the United States government, by HYDRA, by you.” There’s a note of warning in his voice.

Maria blinks for a moment. There is a _lot_ there, and she is nowhere near adequately caffeinated to process it. Before she can gather her thoughts, though, there’s a ping from her open laptop.

She turns instinctively to check it, swiveling her chair. Goddamn Pavlovian response. She’s got to get back out in the field.

Then she sees the notification that’s appeared. It’s a photograph from the _Fairbanks Daily News-Miner,_ four weeks old. A man in a parka, bending to ladle steaming dog food into dancing husky’s bowl. He’s turned enough toward the camera for just a sliver of his profile to be visible. The article is “Photographs from this year’s Copper Basin 300.” The caption is: _A handler for Julia Randolph, second place finisher, prepares meals for her team._

“I don’t believe it,” Maria breathes.

She ignores the sudden clamor of questions over the line. She clicks into her browser, types, _Julia Randolph dog musher._

The fourth hit is a news story from _KTVA 11: The Voice of Alaska._ It’s from yesterday. It’s entitled, _A man of few words: Kaito Takahashi’s last-minute replacement in the Yukon Quest._

There’s a video. Maria clicks it. “I’ll be damned," she says.

“What is it?” Rogers is demanding over the line. “Did you find him? Where is he?”

Maria clicks the link in the article, clicks another, zooms in. The dots on the map are moving in real time. There are almost two dozen of them, clustered together. She zooms in further. The third one in line is labeled: _Jim Grant._

“He’s on his way up the Eagle Summit,” she says. “A hundred miles into the Yukon Quest international sled dog race.”

 

### VIII.

The first hundred miles and change of trail have tempered the dogs’ exuberance to focus, perfectly honed. They run with their ears pricked forward, tails high and waving like flags. The moon throws their shadows long across the snow, and Bucky almost doesn’t need his headlamp to see. He keeps it on anyway, illuminating the way forward. The reflectors on the trail markers are beacons, guiding the team on into the night.

He hasn’t slept much. The dogs have rested twice, but he’s occupied that time with preparing their food, checking them for injury, massaging their muscles and joints. In spite of it, he feels alert and alive, the cold just sharp enough for wakefulness. A faint aurora is shimmering on the horizon, nearly drowned by the light of the moon.

They run on, and on. The team is fast and eager, Pearl and Aspen still in lead, driving the pace. They reach the town of Central, and see two other mushers camped, their teams bedded down in straw. Ash, Bucky’s wheel dog, sidles toward the nearest female, sniffing the air. “Going through,” Bucky tells the checkpoint manager. He picks up a bale of straw and gees his team on.

The time passes strangely. They run, they camp, they run again. He snatches a few scant hours of sleep here and there, curled up with his swing dogs, Clementine’s head on his chest. He crawls into his sleeping bag with his boots on. He wakes and eats and feeds the dogs and journeys on.

He and the other mushers don’t talk much, but they wave when they pass each other, exchange greetings more grunt than language. Checkpoints are isolated islands of warmth and bustle and humanity; he distantly remembers speaking to Kaito and Julie at them, discussing care for Anastasia when he leaves her to them in Circle with a sore shoulder.

He knows he's on the run for his life. He understands that something just happened to him that he  _doesn't_ understand, and that it could happen again, anytime. He understands that Steven Grant Rogers is out there somewhere looking for him, probably, and that a part of him wants to go find him and grab him and never let him go, and a part of him wants to run until he falls off the edge of the world.

It all feels distant. Emotions operate somewhere inside him, under a clouded pane of glass. The dogs are what's real.

They drop onto the Yukon River, and point the sled upstream. The river is bigger than anything. Bigger than the sky. At night, the shore’s too far away for even the highest beam of his headlamp. It reaches blindly into the darkness on either side, yields nothing in return.

It’s plunging past thirty below; Bucky wears his warmest layers, suits the dogs up in theirs. The sky is full of ice crystals, too fine and faint to see except as they burn orange and pink in the setting sun.

The checkpoint in Eagle is a one-room schoolhouse with an ancient red fire engine out front. There are no roads here, no familiar faces, but there’s homemade chili, and a warm place to lay his aching body down. Bucky lets himself sleep there a while, bone-weary.

When he wakes up, there are whispers of military helicopters, of men with rifles interviewing people at Circle.

“They’re after some kind of fugitive,” one of the other mushers is saying, between spoonfuls of chili out of a bowl the size of her head. “There’s rumors it’s connected to a manhunt in Fairbanks last week.”

“Insane to think someone made it out here,” says another. “In this weather? Earl says it’s the coldest Quest he’s seen in twenty years.”

Bucky’s heart races. _Run,_ his mind is saying, _run, get away, go now!_ But the wind outside is howling, the thermometer over the door reading negative forty. He forces himself to move slowly, methodically, as he prepares for his departure. He forces himself to check everything twice.

“You’re heading out?” says the musher by the door, shaking his head in that universal language: _you crazy son-of-a-bitch._ His tone is half admiring, half smug. “Not me. I’m gonna catch a few more Zs here while I can. It’s a long cold way to Dawson.”

It is a long cold way to Dawson. It’s a hundred and fifty miles to Dawson, unsupported, over mountains and down winding canyons, through wolf-haunted woods. It’s a long cold way to Dawson, but Kaito and Haru will be there, Andrew too, and —

— and it’s over the border. Not safe, maybe, not all the way, but — safer.

“My dogs like the cold,” Bucky says.

The musher laughs. “My dogs like cold too. Shit, everyone’s dogs like cold. But this —” He shakes his head. “The dogs might be ready for it, but _I_ sure as hell wasn’t.”

He tilts his face up to the light. He’s got frostbite on the points of each cheekbone, painful-looking and ugly.

Bucky makes a noise he hopes is sympathetic. “Watch the door,” he says, with his hand on the knob. “Don’t mean to blast you.”

The musher grunts his thanks and moves away. Bucky turns the knob.

The wind hits him like a knife. It batters him backward, and for a moment, almost, he thinks of slamming the door closed again. Of staying. Of eating another bowl of chili. Of being warm.

They’ll make him kill people.

He’s not doing that again. Not for a bowl of chili, not for anything. He lowers his head against the wind, shoulders into it, and drags the door closed behind him.

\---

 They run through cold like Bucky’s never known. Not in Siberia, not in cryo; they run through cold that feels like the universe itself snatching away at reality's threads. His metal arm loses all sensation. His flesh one isn’t much better. The wind blows tears from his eyes, and they freeze in tracks down his face. He blinks ice crystals out of his eyelashes.

The dogs run on.

He switches Clementine into lead for Pearl. The wind is whipping up snow, submerging them in a ground blizzard, but she puts her head down and charges on. The trail unspools before them. Bucky loses all sense of anything that’s not the steady vibration from the runners, the beat of his foot helping pedal them up over hills. He has to look down, sometimes, to make sure his hands are still holding onto the sled. To make sure he hasn’t fallen off.

He wonders what the cold was like for Steve.

It’s an unexpected thought, blinding. It snatches the breath from his lungs. Or maybe that’s the wind. There wouldn’t be wind, at least, at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.

He’s read everything he can find about Captain America. He knows the story: the heroic choice, the plane crash, the decades-long search, the revival. He knows the story back to front, the tabloid versions and the scholarly ones, but none of them are Steve’s.

Was he conscious, after he crashed? Did he feel the cold taking over? Was it like cryo, that final breath crystallizing into stillness? Does he remember it at all?

Was he lonely?

The loneliness was the worst part, Bucky thinks. Worse than anything. Worse than the cold.

The wind doesn’t lessen until after he’s made camp, among the aspens along a creek above the Fortymile Gorge. The sun is up and weak, the air still bitterly cold, but they can safely stop moving, he thinks. He can busy himself with his chores while the dogs sleep. He can give them a few hours — no more.

If the weather is easier on him, it will be easier on his pursuers, too.

The border is only thirty miles away. 

He wakes the dogs as the sun sinks low. Ruby licks his face, and fear sinks claws in his chest. This has been a mistake. They can hurt him; that’s one thing. If they hurt the dogs —

But the night is calm, and the Fortymile takes all his concentration, and there’s no room for fear. The trail is narrow and winding, ice bridges over open holes to rushing water below, logs sticking up to form obstacles as the team winds its way deeper and deeper into the gorge. Bucky helps them with his weight, whipping the sled around corners, balancing on one runner to keep it from sliding off a bench of ice and into the water below.

Dog mushing feels like a dream, a lot of the time. An enchanted reality like something out of old stories, where a thousand years could pass in a single night. The calm and cold and stillness, the solitude — it hypnotizes his weary, battered mind. This world is other, remote, absolute.

Sometimes, though, that unreality slips. Sometimes, the trail seems like the only concrete thing in the world. Everything else is the dream.

He can’t sense the wolves, when they join them, but the dogs can.

They’re running above them, on the river banks. Bucky has heard stories about this, from Kaito and from other mushers. When your dogs start running faster, they say — when they prick their ears and _whuff_ to each other and sniff the air for news — that’s when you know. Turn your headlamp on high, and look for reflected eyes. You’ll be lucky if you catch a glimpse of fur. Luckier still to hear them howl.

Bucky’s heard the stories, but there’s still something spine-tingling about experiencing it himself. About knowing they’re there, on either side of him, keeping abreast; about watching the dogs half-wild with excitement, remembering, maybe, some other life in their bones. His skin feels electric. The miles skim by without his attendance. The river straightens out, widens, and when he looks up, casting the beam of his headlight before him, he can see the eyes above him through the trees.

He brakes the team to a halt. In the narrow window of sky above them, the aurora is streaming with abandon, purple and green. The air is still. Bucky tilts up his chin and lets out a long, low howl.

For an instant, there’s silence. Then a wolf’s voice rises, and another.

They’re all around him, echoing off the walls of the gorge. Moaning like the wind in trees, sighing down the valley, over his skin. The hair prickles on his scalp.

His dogs are stock still. Shocked by contact by something so familiar, so other. Then Topaz lifts his long golden head to the sky and sings.

Bucky starts to laugh.

It bubbles out of his chest without him calling it, and he thinks it might be the first time he’s truly laughed in seventy years. He laughs for the joy of it, for the wildness. He laughs for the turning of the century, for the empires that rise and fall, for the rivers that outlast them. He laughs, and his dogs sing, sing with the trees and the wolves and the mountains, with the snow and the dancing sky.

In the distance, another pack has joined the chorus, voices rising from the wooded slopes away to the north. Hailing their neighbors. This is the boundary line, Bucky thinks. Where one pack ends its run and another begins.

Another howl rises, closer, in the trees where the gorge narrows again, just ahead.

An instant later, someone screams.

 

### IX.

Clint is watching _Dog Cops_ with Lucky’s head on his knee when he gets the call, and he would be annoyed if he weren’t so fucking excited.

He’s never been to Alaska. He’s never been much of anywhere that wasn’t on a SHIELD mission, and New Mexico and Madripoor and shit are all well and good, but Alaska is fucking Alaska. Home to wolves. Caribou. Arctic foxes. Bison. And the _coolest dogs on the planet._

No offense to Lucky.

It’s not like he’s been obsessed with the Iditarod since he was four years old. It’s not like he snuck away when the circus stopped in New York to see the statue of Balto in Central Park, or returned the next year to scribble "Justice for Togo!" on the plaque in permanent marker. It’s not like he spent half his childhood attempting to convince dogs and squirrels and stray cats and performing monkeys to pull a sled. It’s not like he’s been dreaming of this day for literal _decades._

On consideration, he probably could’ve flown his own damn self to Alaska long ago, on Avengers pay.

He hadn’t really thought of that.

Regardless. He’s going now, in the middle of racing season no less, and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t get a chance to scratch some sled dog ears while he’s there.

(He’s not sure if they let you do that. Maybe they’ll let him. Being a hero of the Battle of New York has to get you something in life, right?)

So, of course, he winds up confined to the quinjet.

There’s a strategy to it. There’s always a strategy, with Hill, and this time it’s that Natasha is coming in flashy, brandishing paperwork and legalese and her most viciously saccharine smile. Only, if Nat and Cap are going all conspicuously aboveboard, that doesn’t leave them much leeway to tear off on some extralegal operation the moment there’s a whisper of the Winter Soldier. Enter Clint and Sam Wilson, and their second, radar-cloaked quinjet, coasting into Fairbanks in Natasha’s wake.

It’s a good plan. He’ll admit that. It’s a good fucking plan, except that now he’s in _Fairbanks,_ and the _Yukon Quest is starting,_ and he _can’t even go the fuck outside._

“You’re moping, Steve,” says Natasha’s voice over their open comms channel. “Come on. Let’s get out. There’s that dog sled race starting today; we should go watch. Think we can get Talbot to pretend he likes us enough to come along?”

Clint groans and begins beating his head, slowly, rhythmically, against the quinjet wall.

\---

Then — something glorious happens.

“Barton,” says Maria Hill, brisk, voice crackling over the comms. “Wilson. We’re deploying you to Eagle, Alaska. Our target’s on the move.”

Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, has given the entire United States intelligence community the slip by pretending to be a _dog musher._

Only — he’s not pretending. He’s actually running the damn race. He’s running the race and trading places among the top three, the lucky asshole, and Clint has to go sit down on his bunk and breathe in and out for several minutes before he can wipe the idiotic grin off his face.

“You okay, man?” says Wilson, leaning in the doorway. “‘Cause — we should probably be prepping to go.”

“Yeah,” says Clint weakly. “Yeah, I’m — do you think he’d let me pet his dogs?”

Sam stares at him. He opens his mouth, closes it again. Twice.

“Yeah,” he says at last. “Sure. He’ll absolutely let you pet his dogs.”

\---

Trouble is, they know where Barnes is, but Glenn Talbot does too.

There’s a photo of him on the internet now, taken when he led the race into the tiny town of Circle where the trail meets the Yukon River. He’s walking into the checkpoint building, face washed out and high-res, camera flash reflecting off the windowpane behind him. He looks a little dazed, like he’s confused by all the bright lights after days in the wilderness, lips parted as if he’s about to speak. Under the several days of stubble, he could be the Bucky Barnes in the museum.

As Maria Hill puts it: the United States government is dumb, but not _that_ dumb.

Cap comes aboard the jet to see them off. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days either, face pale, cheeks flushed, hair a mess. He wishes them luck in those bracing, wholesome tones Clint has always associated with Captain America, but then Sam raises his eyebrows and lowers his chin and Rogers just — crumples.

“Sam,” he says through his hands, sinking onto the bench. “Sam, you gotta — keep him safe, okay? Don’t bring him in against his will. Just — _talk_ to him. Tell him I —”

“Hey, man,” says Sam, “you know I will,” and pulls Captain America into a hug.

It’s sort of awkward, since Cap’s sitting, and his head winds up against Sam’s stomach. His shoulders are actively heaving, and those are definitely tears, and yeah, Clint’s presence right now is feeling pretty unnecessary.

“I’ll just,” he says, and jerks a thumb vaguely toward the cockpit.

But Cap raises his blotchy face to look at him. “Clint,” he says wetly, “I’m sorry. Thank you so much for taking this on. Both of you.”

It makes Clint’s insides squirm a little that Captain America is sitting here calling him by his first name. Half the time they worked together Clint was trying to kill him.

“Hey,” he says. “I, uh — I get it. I haven’t always been — _compos mentis_ myself, in the line of duty.”

“Even more reason for me to thank you for taking this on,” says Rogers, like he means it.

“Dude. Latin?” says Sam.

All these feelings are making his stomach turn over. “Circus,” Clint mumbles, “you pick things up,” and flees to go over the flight plans.

\---

In the end, though, they never make it to Eagle.

Clint didn’t know a quinjet could get grounded by bad weather. He also didn’t know windchills of negative eighty were even a thing, but here they are, hunkered down in a spruce grove outside Circle, wearing all their layers, with the cold seeping through the quinjet’s walls and the wind whipping ice-crusted branches against the cockpit glass.

There are only two bright sides: that Talbot and his choppers can’t fly either, and that they’re parked with a view through the trees of the trail.

The friendly skies might not be so navigable, but the weather hasn’t stopped the dog mushers. They trickle into the checkpoint one at a time, cocooned in layers and wrapped like burritos in baggy white windproof coats. Their dogs’ breath steams to ice the moment it hits the air.

Their tails are wagging, though; _they_ don’t seem to mind the cold. Clint was right. Sled dogs are the fucking coolest.

So, for two days, he and Sam do nothing. They play a hell of a lot of poker. They watch the online tracker, like everyone else: a series of dots crawling their way over topo lines, down the Yukon River, into Eagle, out again, winding their way up into the mountains. Barnes — Jim Grant — is in the lead now, moving along at a steady pace even as the wind outside drives snow into an impenetrable white wall of blizzard.

Then, at the end of the second day, the wind drops.

It’s still bitterly cold. It doesn’t matter. They can fly.

\---

Talbot makes his move on the cliffs of the Fortymile River, just shy of the Canadian border.

They're blind to the tracker for the first time in days, Sam's tablet batteries flatlining the moment it hits the frigid air. They're blind to the enemy's position — somewhere on the other side of the gorge, lost to the dark. They crouch on the cliff's edge, and watch the river, and wait.

There’s an opening in the canyon just upstream of their position, where moonlight might illuminate the snow, if it were shining. A tricky shot for a sniper, at least. The cliff walls are wider because one of them’s fallen completely in, scattering immense boulders up and down the valley floor; the trail twists between them, a maze of impossible angles. Clint could make it, probably. He doesn’t know many other people who could. Unless Kate Bishop’s recently joined the US Air Force, he thinks they’ll be okay.

No — the shot is closer. Once Barnes passes through the boulders and back into the narrowest part of the canyon. And someone, on the other side, is as ready as he is to fire.

There’s a dance to shooting a bow, a rhythm. Clint learned long ago to count it on his heartbeat: draw on one, aim on two, fire on the caesura. _Thump-thump,_ fire. _Thump-thump,_ fire. He counts other things by his heartbeat, too: tracks moving targets, gauges distance and speed and trajectory, gait, wind.

The moment Barnes appears from the trees at the far side of the opening, Clint knows how many heartbeats before he’s in range.

The night is silent, Sam tense at his side. He counts. _Thump-thump. Thump-thump._ Barnes disappears behind a boulder. _Thump-thump._ He —

— doesn’t come out.

Clint dares a sideways glance at Sam, then back at the boulder. His hands are on his bow, arrow nocked, ready. Nothing moves.

Barnes howls _._

\---

In an instant, all the hair rises on Clint’s skin. He’s not sure why — it’s not _that_ eerie, Barnes’s voice is distinctly human, no weirder than what Clint does when he’s trying to get a rise out of Lucky — and then, from the riverbank, another voice answers.

This one isn’t human. It’s not human at all.

“Holy shit,” breathes Sam, in a choked whisper. “Holy _shit._ ”

They’re surrounded by wolves.

Clint’s skin is tingling, and he doesn’t think it’s only from tension and cold. _Thump-thump._ “It’s all right,” he murmurs back. “They don’t attack people. Usually.”

He can say it all he likes, but he's never been to fucking Alaska before. He's had plenty of opportunity to contemplate his own mortality, but never in the bitter cold a thousand miles from anywhere, never on a night lit only by stars and the northern lights, never in a country he knows, so abruptly and completely, is anything but his own.

The howls are building around them, echoing from the canyon walls. They’re on their bank. The other bank. _Close._ Clint's heartbeat speeds. Far, also, rising from a distant hill, and the dogs are howling too, higher, yipping and moaning, and Barnes is _laughing,_ laughing like a —

Not like a crazy person, actually. Like a guy who’s happy beyond speech that he gets to howl with wolves.

“They don’t usually take orders from a crazy laughing guy, either,” Sam hisses, and Clint breathes back, “they’re not taking _orders,_ ” _thump-thump,_ adrenalin coiling tighter within him, stretching its bounds, and a wolf howls right across the gorge from them, directly across, and someone screams.

Before they’re done, Clint’s arrow has left his bow.

In an instant, the night transforms.

The howling fades as if it had never been. An angry voice is yelling, and another; someone screams, "they're  _in the woods with us,_ I felt one," and shooting by ear is not Clint's specialty, but at this range, with this much noise, it's hard to miss.

He’s firing blunt-tipped boomerang arrows. Shot to stun, not kill. They loop back to embed themselves in the snow at his feet, and he snatches them up again, cycles them through. There won’t be any physical evidence, when they’re done here. No arrow left behind. Under the cover of the chaos, Sam is airborne too and working the back of the line, skimming through the trees to deliver flying kicks to any available heads. Clint keeps shooting. _Thump-thump,_ fire. _Thump-thump,_ fire.

Hell, after that performance, these soldiers might think they’ve been attacked by something altogether supernatural. The demons of Fortymile Gorge.

Barnes is moving again.

His team is charging down the canyon, tongues lolling, ears pricked. Behind them, Barnes is working hard, helping push the sled with his foot, whole body pumping up and down on the runners. Clint almost doesn’t need to keep firing — the soldiers are making their own chaos now. _Thump-thump._ He doesn’t stop.

There’s a moment, below them, when Barnes is completely exposed. Clint could kill him now. Anyone could. Straight down, easiest shot in the world.

No one takes it. The dogs speed on.

Bucky Barnes shoots clear and free, into the night and the vast Canadian wilderness.

 

### X.

In Dawson City, the halfway point of the race, the Takahashis are waiting.

It's a tradition unique to the Yukon Quest: a mandatory rest stop, 36 hours long, when all responsibility passes from a musher’s shoulders. His handlers feed the dogs and walk them and care for their every need. The musher simply sleeps and eats and sleeps again.

Most mushers aren’t fugitives from the United States government.

Eyes are watching Bucky everywhere. Plenty of them are curious fans, excited; some of them are reporters, and he does his best to answer their interview questions with words rather than grunts. He’s _tired,_ worn down from nerves and cold and lack of sleep, and the journey’s not nearly done yet.

Some of the eyes are not casual spectators. A few of them are bruised black.

He wonders if any of the eyes are Steve's.

He can't afford to go looking. Can't afford to do anything but retreat to his hotel room and sleep and eat and wait and be ready.

“They want to grab you,” says Haru pragmatically, “but they’re afraid to do it here.”

It's the first time Bucky's woken up since arriving, and they’re both sitting on his king-sized bed, browsing their way through the stash of junk food Kaito and Andrew brought with them. Julia’s back at home now — preparing for her own race next month, with help from Marie — and Kaito and Andrew are down at the dog tent. They don’t plan to leave the team unsupervised for even a minute. Just in case.

“Don’t see why not,” Bucky answers. In spite of everything, he’s almost too exhausted to be afraid.

Haru crunches loudly on a Dorito and wipes his palms quickly on his pants. He claps a hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “Jim. You are famous!” He beams. “The world is watching!”

Bucky raises his eyebrows.

“Well, a little bit of the world,” Haru amends, without a hint of chagrin.

A voice from the door says, "Enough."

Bucky’s off the bed and spinning on his heel in an instant, reaching for a gun he doesn’t have. He drops into a fighting crouch, edges away from Haru, gauging the intruder. 

She's leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed, unperturbed. She’s dressed in all black, with red hair. She’s subtle about it, but she’s armed.

“Want to ask me in,” she says, “so we can talk in private?”

He knows the way she’s arranged her ankle sheaths. Easy access for her, hard for an opponent to steal in hand-to-hand combat. He retreats another step, breathing hard. “You trained with the Soviets.”

Her smile grows. She says, “So did you.”

Haru crunches loudly on another chip.

He’s still sitting on the bed with his back propped on a pillow, apparently unconcerned. _Get out,_ Bucky tries to tell him with his eyes. _Let me handle this, I can —_

“I already talked to her,” Haru says. “She’s your head of security.”

Bucky doesn’t straighten. “I don’t have a head of security.”

But the redhead unfolds herself delicately from her stance in the door, letting it fall closed behind her. She walks up to him with an outstretched hand.

“Natasha Romanoff. It's nice to meet you." She dimples. "I've heard so much from Steve."

\---

“Betting you already know they’re after you,” says Natasha Romanoff. “But jurisdiction issues, y’know?”

They’ve been through the formalities: Bucky using the offered handshake to flip her, Romanoff landing on her feet, a quick bout of sparring, a couple kill shots neither of them took. Bucky shrugs. He’s pretty sure any jurisdiction issues are short-lived at best.

“It was a brilliant move, putting yourself in the public eye,” says Romanoff. “Maybe they could have grabbed you on the American side of the border, but arresting the leader of a dog sled race, in a foreign country, in the middle of a media encampment? Their hands are tied. I couldn’t have planned it better myself.”

“I planned it,” says Haru, helpfully. Romanoff beams at him.

Bucky suppresses the urge to roll his eyes. “That won’t stop them for long.”

Romanoff’s mouth hardens. “No. It won’t. Once you’re out on the trail again, as soon as they can reasonably disappear you, they will.”

Bucky tugs lightly at the thread of the map in his mind. Not too much; not too hard. There are five hundred miles left to run in the Yukon Quest. But he only has to make it fifty.

He says, “Not if I disappear first.”

\---

When Romanoff leaves, she kisses Haru’s cheek, and he follows her to close the door behind her. He hobbles back slowly — Haru’s never moved too well when he isn’t on sled runners — and sinks down next to Bucky on the bed.

“She has a friend who wants to pet the dogs,” he says. “I told her that he could.”

He glances sideways at Bucky, as if he’s asking permission. Bucky says, “They’re your dogs.”

That seems to satisfy Haru. He leans back onto his pillow with a satisfied sigh, closes his eyes, then says, “You have been around a long time, I think, Jim-kun.”

He’s too tired to come up with a lie. Bucky nods his head yes.

“Longer than me, even.”

Another nod.

Haru’s lips curl in a smile. “I should call you Jim- _sama. Sensei._ ”

He says the words lightly, but they drop like stones into Bucky’s stomach, curdle there. He doesn’t deserve any honorifics — not of friendship, not of respect. He’s done nothing but bad in the world for seventy years — and now he’s gone and drawn the Takahashis into it.

“Jim,” says Haru gently.

He leans to study Bucky’s face, a questioning look in his eyes. Bucky turns away.

“Let me tell you a story,” says Haru, settling back, serene. “About a young man who went to war for his country.”

Bucky knows the story.

It is Haru’s, and he’s heard it before, on lonely winter nights when the wind howls loud in the chimney. The long, cold, brutal campaign for the Aleutian Islands. The desperate defense of Attu. The final, desperate _banzai_ charge to the beach, the grim fighting, the defeat.

_The doctors had already killed all the wounded in the hospital,_ Haru always says. _We knew what we were to do. When the time comes, and there is no one left to fight: you die with honor. You hold your grenade to your chest and you pull the pin._

Only twenty-eight Japanese soldiers survived the Battle of Attu. Only twenty-eight, and Haru among them. _If my family ever knew,_ he always says, with his eyes on some faraway horizon, _you cannot imagine the shame. But I — I wanted to live._

"I know the story," Bucky says. He feels folded in on himself, furious, remote. There is nothing he can take from here.

“No,” answers Haru, gently. “This is not the story you know.”

He sighs deeply, settling himself further against his pillow. His hand dances over the pile of food on the bed until he finds the last package of peanut butter cups. He unwraps it carefully, hands one to Bucky, takes a tiny bite of the other.

He closes his eyes in appreciation, rolling the chocolate on his tongue. He takes a long moment to swallow. Bucky holds his own candy, untouched, and waits.

“The man in the story you know,” he says. “He found his grenade, he held it to his chest. But he did not not pull the pin. He could not. He wanted too badly to live. The man in _my_ story did not."

There's a stillness in the room around them. A stillness like a door to another world; a stillness like years crawling back, time folding in on itself, dust motes falling. Bucky holds his breath. Haru stares past the wall. His eyes are dreaming.

“The man in my story killed Americans because he wanted to. The man in my story wanted to die a noble death. A hero’s death. The man in my story pulled the pin."

He turns. He smiles; his eyes are wet. He says, "It was a dud."

Bucky's mind is under a blanket of snow. Snow, and years, and blame, recrimination; hatred, fear and pain. He feels blood on his hands. His face. He breathes, "Do you ever regret it?"

Haru takes another bite of his chocolate, smooths the blankets over his knees. “Then? Every day. I tried to kill myself in POW camp — oh, more times than I can count. I ran when they wanted to send me back to Japan. I could not bear to let my family know my shame. I fled back to the north, to the wilderness. I wanted to live somewhere as cold and bitter as my soul. Then —” He smiles. “Then, I met a dog. Later a woman. But first a dog.”

His eyes are still on the wall. It’s an anonymous hotel shade, a still-life of a vase of flowers hung in a frame. His gaze, though, is somewhere beyond it: a trapline, a battlefield, the bodies of his friends.

“Do I regret it? All this?” Haru turns to look at him with a smile like the sun. His gesture takes in the hotel room, the pile of junk food, the still-life, the vastness that is the world beyond. Bucky.

“I am the luckiest man who ever lived, Jim-kun," he says. "I do not regret it for a second.”

 

### XI.

Sam is not entirely sure Natasha traded places with him as a favor.

If he's going to be stuck on supersoldier-babysitting duty, the brainwashed ex-HYDRA assassin on the run for his life and sanity through the frozen north is looking like a better and better option. Better, at least, than Captain America: the star-spangled man with a plan to depress the hell out of everyone around him.

“Steve,” he says, for the fifth time today. “When was the last time you slept? Or showered?”

Steve turns to look up at him, wretched. “Sam,” he says, “I should be helping him.”

“You are.” Goddamn that face. “Hey. You got here, right? You stopped them from taking him in. You brought in backup. You’re actually listening to Nat and Hill, which — smart fucking move, by the way. You’re giving him a fighting chance to get away. And since you don’t want him in US custody —”

“Yeah,” sighs Steve. “I’m just — not too sure anymore that that’s the right call.”

Sam stares. “Oh, hell no,” he says. “You don’t get to change your mind about this _now._ ”

“Not Talbot’s custody,” Steve says swiftly. “But ours — he didn’t know me, Sam. You weren’t there. He fought Rhodey’s men and ran. What if he needs help? What if he hurts people — or himself? If I had a chance to get through to him —”

“Steve,” says Sam, as gently as he can. “Prosecute him or weaponize him. That’s what they’ll do, if we take him in.”

Steve takes a shuddering breath.

“ _If_ he makes it that far,” Sam adds grimly. “Talbot and his guys were shooting to kill.”

There’s something uniquely sad about seeing one of the strongest men on earth hunched over on a hotel bed like a little kid. Steve’s shoulders are high around his ears, jaw tight, back tense with misery. It occurs to Sam, not for the first time, how very fucking lonely the life of Captain America must be.

If he were one of the guys in Sam's group, he'd —

Shit, he doesn't know what he'd do. He's had a lot of tough cases, down at the VA, but none tougher than the woman juggling her own nightmares of Basra while her husband drank his way through Fallujah.

“Hey,” he says softly. “We’ll get another shot. Without Talbot breathing down our necks. Nat says she thinks Barnes has a plan; maybe we can give him a way to contact us, once he’s clear.”

“He talked to Nat,” says Steve.

Sam hesitates. That’s a good thing, right? Steve doesn’t sound like it’s a good thing.

“He talked to Nat,” Steve repeats miserably. “He talks to reporters. And he didn’t even _recognize_ me. Maybe I’m the worst thing for him. Maybe I should —”

He breaks off. He takes one shuddering breath, another, and — stuffs it down. Stuffs it all down. Straightens.

Sam may never have gotten his psych Master's, but he sure as hell knows  _that's_ not healthy.

Before he can speak, though, the phone rings. And Steve's hitting speaker, dropping it to the table between them. "Hey, Natasha," he says smoothly, as if mere seconds ago he wasn't on the edge of a breakdown.

“Hey, boys,” says Natasha. She sounds pleased with herself, like a cat curling into a patch of sun. She yawns deliberately. “Six hours til Barnes leaves again, Talbot’s off your asses, and Maria and Rhodey finally got Steve’s obstruction of justice thing cleared up. Me and Clint sure could use a break. If you _wanted_ to take over surveillance —”

Sam raises his eyebrows at Steve. _What was that about keeping your distance?_

But Steve is already on his feet, nearly knocking the phone to the floor in his haste to move. “Yes,” he’s saying, fervent, “yes, we’ll get ready right away — _thank you,_ Natasha. I —” He looks around urgently. “Should pack my things. Take a shower. We’ll be ready in —”

He disappears into the bathroom, still talking. Sam shakes his head. “Did Barton get to pet his husky pups?” he says.

Natasha laughs. “Yes,” she answers simply. “All of them. Twice.”

 

### XII. 

Bucky is eligible to leave Dawson City at 8:30 in the morning, 36 hours exactly after his arrival. He leaves at 9:25.

“Sled trouble,” he says, at the start line, when the reporters ask.

“This delay has cut significantly into your lead,” Andrea from KUAC points out, leaning eagerly in. He's learned most of the reporters' names, by now. “Are you worried about your ability to maintain your position, with Henrik Olsen now departing only five minutes behind you?”

He's starting to think they kind of like his one-word answers. Bucky says, “No.”

In point of fact, he hasn’t had any sled trouble, and he’s not worried because he has no intention of finishing the race. All he needs is to make it as hard as possible for Talbot and his men to drop in on him — to ensure they have as much of an audience as possible if they do. A small city is ideal, but a couple other mushers will do.

There are two hundred miles of wilderness between Dawson City and the next real checkpoint in Pelly Crossing. They'll try to disappear him somewhere in there; his luck will only hold so long.

That's okay. All Bucky has to do is disappear himself first.

He mounts his runners. The cheers erupt. The race marshal waves him forward.

And it's him and the dogs again.

The commotion of Dawson fades to stillness within minutes. The teaming is bounding with energy, eager to run; they charge on the downhills, rejoice their way up even the steepest slopes. There are more and more of those — they’re climbing, now, toward King Solomon’s Dome, the highest point of the race.

It’s warmer on the mountaintops than in the river valleys, where cold air settles in the cradle of the hills. The caribou have fled here from the bottomlands, and the ridgeline is dense with tracks where they’ve pawed through the snow to reach the vegetation below. In some places, the wind has helped; in others, it’s built deep snowdrifts that the dogs plunge through with will. They’re excited, sniffing the air, heads swiveling. Once, they see a herd, and nearly take off after it, but Bucky shouts “Haw!” and Clementine listens, bodyslams Aspen back in line.

Then it’s down again, winding through the trees. He catches glimpses of Olsen from time to time behind him; he knows that Marta Ryans isn’t far back. He counts down the miles.

And almost too soon, it's over.

He knows it by the topo maps he's memorized, but also by the tug, half revulsion, in his bones. A nice trick they pulled on him there: tie his old life to names that go with bases. Bases go with chairs, and chairs with pain. Conditioning. Compliance.

For all he knows, he'll go blank when he sees one again. If he doesn't, he means to tear it to shreds.

He isn't ready. It's not enough time, but his pursuers are out there, somewhere, and he realizes suddenly that he's not only running from them. He's running  _to_ something. Resources. A plan. A way to disarm the triggers in his head — to take them out, one at a time, until maybe their power over him wanes.

Maybe — maybe, if he  _fixes_ it, he could find Steve —

He isn't ready, but he's ready enough. He stops to feed his team in a sunny spot by the side of the trail, too narrow for others to pull off alongside him. He waves politely as they pass.

And then they’re gone, and he’s alone.

The next group of racers are four full hours behind him — no risk of discovery there. The base is in the hills to his north. It has food, supplies, weapons, a helicopter. He can stay there for months if he needs to. He can chopper out. He can make himself some new IDs, a new name.

He needs to say goodbye.

He mushes them on for two more miles, then stops again, and grabs his bale of straw. The dogs are confused — they’re rested and energized, ready to keep running. It isn’t time to stop yet. They aren’t sleepy. They prance and leap to lick his face as he shakes out piles of bedding.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs to each of them. He bends to cradle their faces, the snowy ruffs of their fur. “I’ll miss you, Ruby. I’ll miss you, Pants.”

He doesn’t see the man behind him. He doesn’t hear him drop into the snow, or witness the odyssey that is the expression on his face, before he opens his mouth to speak.

“Bucky,” Steve says.

Bucky turns.

\---

Steve looks unlike himself, wrapped in heavy layers, but the shield is still on his arm. He lowers it, slowly, to the snow.

“Do you know me?”

Bucky feels his heart thud. _Don’t think of the dots. Don’t lose yourself like last time._

This wasn't in the plan.

“You’re Steve,” he says, slowly. “I read about you in a museum.”  _And a hundred books. And the disjointed annals of my own brain._

Behind him, Hester whines.

Steve says, “You’re leaving.”

“I’ll hit the SOS button on my tracker. Kaito will be here to pick up the dogs.”

He's babbling nonsense, mechanical, reporting out so he doesn't have to report in. A part of his brain is screaming, but it's not the part of his brain that enforces compliance. It's the part of his brain that — that —

“You’re _leaving,_ ” says Steve again, voice breaking, a desperate noise, a wounded-animal noise, and Bucky doesn’t even tell them to. Clementine jumps up and surges for him, and then Dave, dragging the line with them, until Steve has heads butting his knees and paws scrabbling at his hips and tongues slurping at his face. He lets out a laugh that’s half a sob and doubles over, burying his hands in the sea of fur.

Bucky watches with a horrible pain in his throat as his dogs give what he can’t.

“You can’t trust me,” he says, hollow. “ _I_ can’t trust me. I’m still — it’s all still here.”

“We can get you somewhere safe, Buck,” says Steve, in a rush. “We can — next time we meet —”

It feels like someone’s reached into his chest to rip his ribs from his sternum. “Next time we meet,” he answers heavily, “I might not be —” _me._ He doesn’t say it. “I might try to kill you.”

The anguish on Steve’s face is the mirror of Bucky’s insides. “Do you _know me,_ "he says, again, a furious prayer.

He has to go. He has to go.

He straps on his snowshoes, shoulders his backpack. He presses the button on his tracker.

He turns away. He hesitates. He looks back, half over his shoulder.

“Your mom’s name,” he says softly, “was Sarah. You used to wear newspapers in your shoes.”

Steve lurches, face white. He looks for an instant like he’s going to run after Bucky. Like he’s going to follow Bucky to the end of the earth and beyond.

“Keep them company, okay? Until Kaito gets here.” Bucky’s smiling, a crack through his being, a fissure straight down to his soul. The sun and the snow fill his vision to blinding; his eyes water. “Clementine wants to cuddle. You can give them salmon snacks.”

“Okay,” breathes Steve. His eyes are streaming. No pretense there. “Okay.”

“I,” says Bucky.

_I. I’m Bucky. I’m sorry. I know you. I_ know _you. I —_

He swallows it down.

He says, “I have to go.”

 

### XIII.

Steve’s been there two hours when he hears the roar of the snowmachine.

It feels like two days. It feels like a century, like a second; time always fucking resets itself, with Bucky. He's cried and he's laughed and he's cried again, sitting on his ass in the snow, until Bucky's dogs — they're not Bucky's dogs but they are a little, now — are wound all around him, heads in his lap and tug lines tangled with his boots.

He considers trying to extract himself before anyone can see him. He can't find the energy. So that's how Kaito Takahashi finds him, with his eyes red and his lap full of Clementine, sitting cross-legged like a child.

He doesn't seem overly shocked about it. He pulls off his helmet and surveys the scene. He's young, and good-looking. He says, "You must be Steve."

Steve has no idea — absolutely no idea — how to answer.

“I gave them salmon snacks,” he tries, after a moment. “Buck — Jim said it was okay.”

Kaito smiles. His cheeks have dimples. “It _is_ true. I thought my grandfather was just spinning fairytales." The dogs are up and detangling themselves, tails wagging milling around him; Steve gets slowly to his feet. "But then," says Kaito, "you're kind of a fairytale yourself."

Steve swallows. “I should go.” Sam and the quinjet are somewhere nearby; he’ll be listening in. “Before anyone else gets here. My presence — raises complications.” 

Kaito hesitates, eyes on Steve's face, assessing. Then he wades through the dogs, expertly maneuvering their tangled lines, and holds out his hand.

Steve takes it. And it occurs to him that this man knows Bucky better than he does, now; the unfairness, the relief, the gratitude, that  _someone_ knows Bucky. “Thank you,” he chokes. “For — taking him in, and helping him, I don’t know how to thank you —”

Behind him, he hears a whir of turbines. The quinjet flickers into visibility, its ramp creaking open.

There’s no time. No time for everything he wants to say, no way to express it. He hesitates there, helpless, a severed rope hanging useless in the wind.

Kaito covers Steve’s hand with two of his own. “Good luck, Captain Rogers,” he says quietly. “It’s been an honor to meet you. Both of you. If I know anything about fairytales —”

He smiles. The wind off the quinjet’s turbines stirs his hair. He releases Steve, bends, and stands with the shield in his hands — Steve had forgotten it, almost, there in the snow. Kaito holds it out as if presenting it to him, and Steve takes it, slides it onto his arm.

“If I know anything about fairytales,” Kaito repeats, quietly, “I know you’ll meet again.”

“Steve,” Sam calls, warning. There’s another sound in the air: helicopters, getting closer. Steve catches his breath.

"I don't," he says. "I don't know what to say."

Kaito smiles. He shakes his head. "Go."

" _Steve!_ "

The helicopters are getting closer. Steve hesitates one more instant, nods breathlessly, and runs.

Sam’s already closing the ramp has he jumps to its lip. He hauls himself up, bulky with the shield. He manages one last glance, through the narrowing crack of the closing door.

Kaito Takahashi is back to petting his dogs. The forested hills around him are vast and still and calm. Somewhere in them is Bucky. On the way to his next chapter. His next flight. His next name.

_But he knew me._ I know you. _He knew me._

The hills march on without end. They vanish blue into the horizon.

And they're gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Have some notes!
> 
>   * I know absolutely nothing about branches of the military and international jurisdiction and chains of command. So... sorry 'bout that.
>   * I _do_ know quite a bit about sled dog racing and the Yukon Quest, and got a bunch of that wrong too! While this fic features a Yukon Quest race taking place in 2015, it does _not_ reflect the actual 2015 Yukon Quest. (Most importantly, the YQ alternates direction each year, so 2015 was Whitehorse to Fairbanks, not Fairbanks to Whitehorse. The weather and trail conditions for this fic were based most closely on the 2018 YQ. I didn't use any real dogs' or mushers' names.)
>   * That said, the Yukon Quest is a REALLY COOL RACE. Their [website](http://www.yukonquest.com/) is a magical place. Check out this article about [trailbreaking](http://www.yukonquest.com/news/original-trailbreaker-so-many-ways-describe-ice-and-snow). If you want to follow along, I also highly recommend the blogs and/or facebook pages of individual racing kennels — my favorites include SP Kennel, Smokin' Ace Kennels, Ryno Kennel, Squid Acres Kennel, and Hey Moose! Kennel (home to Kristin Knight Pace, who is a fabulous writer and has a [book](https://www.amazon.com/This-Much-Country-Kristin-Knight-ebook/dp/B07F6C61TX) coming out in March).
>   * The [Battle of Attu](https://www.nps.gov/articles/battle-of-attu.htm) is a really interesting, chilling, and often-forgotten piece of WWII history. I wanted to write about a Japanese-Alaskan family in part because of [The Cloud Atlas](https://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Atlas-Liam-Callanan/dp/0385336950) by Liam Callanan, a novel about Alaska during WWII.
>   * Bucky using a bit of plank to eat his beans is an homage to a legendary interview in March 2018 with then-Iditarod frontrunner Nic Petit, who was eating his dinner with a broken off trail marker and when asked about it responded, through a haze of sleepless nonchalance, that he loses everything, but: "you can always find a piece of wood."
> 

> 
> ETA: I went and did the [tumblr thing](https://gravelghosts.tumblr.com/post/180245990104/mcu-fic-all-the-cold-in-the-world-bucky), if you want to reblog. Thanks for reading! <3


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